Should Be a Good Discussion

Tonight! https://t.co/YcwKFYZKNG

— Sheptytsky Institute (@Sheptytsky) September 14, 2021

Eastern Christian Books: On Liturgical Dogmatics: David Fagerberg Interviewed

Eastern Christian Books: On Liturgical Dogmatics: David Fagerberg Interviewed

Eastern Christian Books: An Omnium Gatherum of Articles and Books on Synods and Synodality

Eastern Christian Books: An Omnium Gatherum of Articles and Books on Synods and Synodality

DeVille is an egalitarian with respect to certain levels but he gives no principled reason for this egalitarianism not being applied to holy orders as well. (Perhaps he would just throw up his hands and say something about "unchanging Tradition.) With the way the churches are decaying, it may not be possible for him to find enough men to make parish councils 50% men.

Eastern Christian Books: Married Priests in the Catholic Church

Eastern Christian Books: Married Priests in the Catholic Church

UND Press

DeVille Reviews Guckin's Book on the Orthodox Church

CWR: New history of the Eastern Orthodox Church is often superb, sometimes lacking by Adam DeVille John Anthony McGuckin’s The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History is often thrilling and informative, but is lacking when it comes to the papacy, anti-Catholicism, and Islam.

Married Priests in the Catholic Church

@AAJDeVille1's "Married Priests in the Catholic Church" (April pub) is on page 10 @UNDPress's Spring 2021 Catalog. We are so excited about sharing this #book with the world! https://t.co/bZCh95tZ5Z

— Kathryn Pitts (@pitts5ndedu) October 15, 2020

The Crisis of the Abuse of Power and Christian Reconciliation

FWIW

Not too late to join us on Zoom tomorrow for this panel on abuses of power in Christian organizations: https://t.co/5IC2YBDsTv

— A.A.J. DeVille, Ph.D. (@AAJDeVille1) October 8, 2020

Eastern Christian Books: Ordaining Women in the Orthodox Church

Eastern Christian Books: Ordaining Women in the Orthodox Church

Such an endorsement by David Bentley Hart casts doubts on his personal orthodoxy, as if his dogmatic speculation on universalism wasn't enough. The description provided for the book and the background of some of the contributors render all those who are contributing suspect, even though some (Fr. Andrew Louth?) may be just presenting "the other side" of the argument. Is this something open for discussion? Do any of the Chalcedonian Orthodox clerics make the claim that the ordination of women to the presbyterate and episcopate is beyond the bounds of discussion and possibility? From the reports I have read, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has capitaulted and embraced the position that it is open to discussion. Are there any Orthodox bishops willing to cut the innovators off from communion? I suspect the Greeks are too weak to do so.

Wipf and Stock: Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice, eds. Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya

Two Perspectives on Vatican II

The first is from theologian and bishop Franco Giulio Brambilla, as relayed by Sandro Magister: A Bishop and Theologian Breaks the Silence Over the “Banality” of Viganò and Company

In fact, this is the contribution of the most significant statements of this last decade, before, during, and after Pope Benedict's statement in 2005.
We could outline the theme of the legacy in three moves:
a) Vatican II as style: to resume the original way in which the council fathers (which historical studies have made known to us) posed problems with the method and resources that they put to work in order to propose a response to the challenges of their time in the interaction between subjects, textual “corpus,” and new readers;
b) the principle of pastorality: to bring out the originality of Vatican II, its creative ideas and its basic intuitions in the areas of both method and content;
c) the future of the Council: to rediscover the state of invention that characterized that epochal turning point and that today needs, at the beginning of the third millennium, a creative recovery and a new ecclesial pragmatics.

And the following is from Adam DeVille: Vatican II as “chosen trauma” and “chosen glory”.

If nothing else, the decision to be faced by Catholics today is whether we will allow ourselves to manifest the maturity necessary to stop treating Vatican II as either a trauma or a glory and instead to see it as all councils from our past: an event where some of the crooked lines of human history were used by God to write straight the salvation of the world. If He is content to leave some lines askew on the page, some tares and wheat in the fields of the Church until the end of the age (cf. Matt. 13: 24-30), why can we not grant ourselves the same freedom to stop clinging to pseudo-intellectual genealogies helpful to nobody and instead get to work healing today’s myriad crises in Church and world alike?

Even though DeVille is Ukrainian Catholic, he assumes that Vatican II was an ecumenical council, or at least a council of both Roman Catholics and of Eastern Catholics. As far as I'm concerned, even if various Eastern Catholic bishops signed the documents, that does not make Vatican II an ecumenical council, and even the claim that it was a "general" council of the churches in communion with the bishop of Rome is question, given the lack of equal weight given to Eastern perspectives. I see it in content and function as being a synod of the Latin churches in communion with the bishop of Rome, and it needs to be understood carefully: not as an ecumenical council, but as a Latin council with certain pretensions, to be historically situated in the development of the Roman papacy in the second millenium and with reference to the claims of Rome, which go back to the first millenium. It also must be understood with the proximate and not-so-proximate causes that lead up to the council, which explain why Latin bishops and theologians thought some sort of reform was necessary.

Adam DeVille on John Paul II

CWR: John Paul II: Diagnostician of Divisions, Doctor of Ecumenism by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
In the encyclical Ut Unim Sint, given twenty five years ago, the late pope wrote about “the necessary purification of past memories,” a consistent and urgent theme of his pontificate.

Deville uses both Taft and John Paul II for a discussion of the healing of memories. That certainly is a necessary part of reconciliation.

Nevertheless, there are more recent and more hopeful signs. These have increased with Constantinople’s granting of autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church last year. With Russia thereby losing control over much of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in 2019, the latter remains free to deepen the healing in its already amicable and often co-operative relationship with Ukrainian Catholics.

Whether what is going on in Ukraine is a helpful development or not remains to be seen. The jockeying between Moscow and Constantinople needs to end (and recognition of Roman primacy is not the quick solution that Latin polemicists would make it to be); this may require further humbling of both historic sees by God. There needs to be ecclesial reform happening in many churches, but not the changes that liberal progressives want.

Adam DeVille

This week on the podcast: Sex, Money, Pwer & the Challenge of Church Reform -- conversations with @JohnLAllenJr of @Crux and @AAJDeVille1 of @USFFW -- https://t.co/r1U4Pa0tiy

— Catholic Herald: Behind the Headlines (@CHBehindHdlns) May 8, 2020

Adam DeVille Reviews Eros Crucified

Routledge

CWR Dispatch:The Idolatry of Eros and the Corporeality of God by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
Matthew Clemente’s Eros Crucified is philosophy of religion done by a young scholar in such a way as to give one great hope for the future not just of the discipline, but of Catholic letters and intellectual culture more generally.

Some thoughts:

DeVille writes:

One popular, and often dreaded, buzzword in the academy today is “intersectionality,” which is just a newer version of the idea Newman first demonstrated so winsomely: “all knowledge forms one whole.” Clemente, a young Catholic philosopher of religion at Boston College, lives Newman’s method in this book (without mentioning him). Clemente ranges freely across theology and philosophy, refusing to allow them to be forcibly separated via an act of what Paul Ricoeur famously called “controlled schizophrenia.” But Clemente’s point, and method, is not merely reflective of current academic preoccupations to bring things together. It is, in fact, the only method on offer to human thinkers, who cannot (and must not) be bamboozled into seeing the world as divisible, the end result of which is the creation of some “private” sphere labelled the “secular” from which God has been exiled into some other sealed sphere called “religion.” In philosophizing in this way, Clemente is reflecting some of the best insights of recent philosophers including Charles Taylor and one of Clemente’s mentors, the philosopher (and Greek Orthodox priest) John Panteleimon Manoussakis.

Is Clemente's book really philosophy of religion, as opposed to Christian theology? For an unbeliever who reasons accordingly, it might be philosophy of religion. But for a Christian who thinks thus? It is theology, even if the author's academic degree is in philosophy.

Clemente wants us to think about the corporeality of God and its nakedly erotic self-giving in the Eucharist (“this is my body”) as well as its implications for us as human beings in our quotidian living, desiring, and dying, our lovemaking and birth-giving. (Clemente’s one-and-a-half-page conclusion, a meditation on watching and waiting with his wife give birth to their first son, packs in more biblical theology than a year’s worth of homilies from your average preacher.) Clemente writes with verve and a wide sweep of philosophy and theology, ancient and modern. All this learning, including considerable insights from psychoanalytic thought, is rendered in a way that is at once lively and serious.

Might there be some truth in Freud's writings? Perhaps. Would it be better to rely upon sound philosophical psychology which is open to the insights of Christians with rich interior knowledge and wisdom? I would think so. But doesn't it depend on one's audience? What if one is reaching out to those who have been influenced by Freud? How many of those are left?

One does not have a conversation with the dead who can no longer answer for themselves, but with the living, and this is true even in the scholastic method. So how many committed Freudians are there who need an apologia of Christianity or of Christ?

Then there is the question of whether Freud's reasoning and not just his claims can be captured well in essay form... This does raise a question of what the best way of transmitting reasoning through the written word. Something for theologians and philosophers to consider, even if they reject the manualist approach.

The Eastern Tradition of Married Priesthood, True Light Podcast Episode 10

An interview with Adam DeVille

One Take on the Eucharist

CWR Dispatch: Sacramental inefficiency and liturgical uselessness: Insights from St. John Paul II and Romano Guardini by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
Perhaps in this time of pandemic we may appreciate anew—but from afar and with real hunger and renewed appreciation—the sacraments we have hitherto taken for granted, now temporarily lost to us.

Erich Fromm

CWR Dispatch: Lent, fear of freedom, and love of slavery
This year, during Lent, I am going to focus on this question: “In which areas am I unfree, and why do I prefer this slavery to freedom?”

Eastern Christian Books: Ivan Illich and Erich Fromm on the Corrupt Church

Ed Peters Responds to Adam DeVille

Ignoring law is not remedied by ignoring it even more

The crux:

According to canon law, the Roman Pontiff (nb: a human being) “possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely.” 1983 CIC 331. Surely some indication from DeVille that he is aware of this law, and of the doctrinal values behind it, is owed lest he seem to imply that, in establishing Peter as the one Rock, Our Lord invited disaster upon his Church.

Further according to canon law, the College of Bishops (nb: a small group of people) “is also the subject of supreme and full power over the universal Church.” 1983 CIC 336. Again, no indication is given that DeVille sees how Our Lord’s vesting supreme and full power in this tiny group of believers passes muster under DeVille’s supposedly foundational maxim.

But these claims that I have underlined are theological or ecclesial, particular to the patriarchate of Rome, and not "canonical" and certainly not reflecting the canons of the Church Universal.

But the solution to unenforced canon and civil law is not the further and complete ignoring of those laws and the fashioning of new, institutionally unsound procedures resting on fantastical histories and flimsy logic. The solution is the enforcement of laws by Church and State officials and the visitation of harsh penalties on the perpetrators of wicked crimes.

New laws may be necessary. Is the logic flimsy? I don't think so -- more likely than not, they are logically sound with respect to DeVille's ecclesiological principles. One can debate whether those principles are sanctioned by Tradition, but the ecclesiological principles as held by the patriarchate of Rome may be dear to Rome but they are not universally accepted.

Breaking the Monopoly

CWR Dispatch: Relieving Rome’s burdens: A proposal for handling abuse cases by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille

DeVille Reacts to That New Book on Clerical Celibacy

Catholic Colonialism and Its Subaltern Celibates by A. A. J. DeVille

Dealing with Death

CWR Dispatch: November and remembering our beloved dead by Adam A. J. DeVille
The vacuous talk used today in addressing death is becoming common, but it is the disappearance of practices around death that is infinitely worse.

I need to reread what St. Augustine recounts is St. Ambrose's objection to the following practice:

Edifying in an even more physically basic fashion is to have a picnic in a cemetery, which may seem the height of weirdness to some, but it was a wonderfully jovial and human thing to do. After the prescribed panachyda was prayed (a short memorial office in the Byzantine tradition) we relaxed by sharing drinks and food while recounting stories of those whose graves became makeshift tables for our libations. Our solemn prayers and tears were mingled with laughter and shots of vodka as we feasted in anticipation of the wedding feast of the Lamb, where there will one day be neither mourning nor dying, but all of us reunited around the table of eternity.